1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a digital recording/playback apparatus for recording and playing back digital stream data such as images and sounds and, more particularly, to a digital recording/playback apparatus for recording and playing back moving image data from a digital video camera.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a digital recording/playback apparatus has been developed which can save stream data composed of moving image data and sound data sensed and recorded by a digital video camera into a medium such as a large-capacity hard disk drive (HDD) or CD-R (writable CD), and can play back the data on a monitor screen such as a TV screen.
This apparatus can be applied to a digital codec apparatus, such as a TV telephone, for in-stream playback. A digital recording/playback apparatus saves stream data by converting it into compressed data configured by a predetermined data format. A playback mode such as in-stream playback requiring no random access need not have any playback sequence change functions (special playback functions) such as pause, fast forward, and rewind. Therefore, these special playback functions are not taken into account in the data format.
The conventional digital recording/playback apparatuses are applied to digital codec apparatuses primarily used for in-stream playback and having no special playback functions such as pause, fast forward, and rewind. A digital recording/playback apparatus is originally equipped with a medium such as an HDD or CD-R drive capable of random access, and can therefore realize special playback functions such as pause, fast forward, and rewind. However, the data format of stream data does not usually take account of these special playback functions. Hence, when pause, fast forward, or rewind is simply executed, a read start pointer (information indicative of a read start position when data is to be read out from a medium during playback) is moved to an arbitrary position in stream data stored in a medium, and the data is read out from that position. Therefore, if this read start pointer is present at an arbitrary position in a certain block (packet) of the data format, only a part of data in that block is played back. Consequently, a playback error (decoding error) such as mute (no playback) sometimes occurs.